2010

2009

Archive of Matthew Cole

Patrick Bond, professor of political economy, has given Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin's The Making of Global Capitalism a glowing review in Red Pepper Magazine.

He attests that the book is "better than anything else now available" at revealing "Washington’s combined, uneven and fatally contradictory processes of imperialist expansion, catastrophic financialisation, excessively liberalised trade, intensifying class struggle and crisis mismanagement."

Panich and Gindin:

provide a masterful century-long history of US corporate activity and state economic strategy. Insofar as capitalist states are where class interests are codified, their spicy reading of dry officialdom’s milquetoast narratives is absolutely vital to our knowledge about power.

The Making of Global Capitalism is making waves across the UK and Europe. As Adam David Morton, Associate Professor in Political Economy and co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ) at the University of Nottingham, notes on his blog, "the book is rightly heralded as a groundbreaking assessment of American empire in shaping global capitalism." Furthermore:

This is a political economy of American empire that rivals the work of Eric Hobsbawm in its accessibility and its forensic grasp of the intellectuals of statecraft (referring to a whole community of American state bureaucrats, leaders, foreign policy experts, and advisors who comment upon, influence, and conduct the activities of statecraft) essential to the making of global capitalism.

Steven Connor, in the Times Literary Supplement, sums up the major importance of Slavoj Žižek's ''everlasting gobstopper of a book" Less Than Nothing. In a single paragraph, Connor explains Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit as the 'engorgement' of Spirit through the dialectical movement of history (spirit meets its negative antagonist in the form of matter or the material world and responds by both preserving and overcoming both thesis and antithesis through the process of sublation), the principle of the postmodernist reaction to it (denouncing the Hegelian dialectic as one of several totalising conceptions of the world that it rejects) and finally Žižek's critical thrust that manages to:

both discredit postmodernist arguments in their dependence on a dishing of Hegel, and to endorse the objections to totality that are key to those postmodernist arguments.

Why? It’s ideology, stupid. After his 1,200-page Lacanese-Hegelian philosophical treatise, Žižek has returned to his other prism—popular culture. The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, Director Sophie Fiennes new film with Žižek, premiered at the 56th BFI London Film Festival next week to a packed cinema. As I watched the 90-minute cinematic remix of various twentieth-century films including Zabriski Point, The Sound of Music, They Live, The Titanic, Seconds, Taxi Driverand more, Zizek in his characteristically witty style, expliained his concept of ideology.